"It's Part of the Job"

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In this Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009 picture, Lebanese police stand guard as protesters carry banners during a sit-in for gays and lesbians in Beirut. In February, about two dozen gays and lesbians held a rare sit-in on Beirut's major intersection of Sodeco to protest what they called the beating of two gay men by two plainclothes police. Police officials denied the men were beaten by their officers.

Summary

Mohammad, 30, spent 11 days in detention in the Zahleh
police station in 2007 after police arrested him for drug possession. He told
Human Rights Watch that the police beat him severely until he confessed to
using drugs. He said, “They took me to interrogation naked, poured cold
water on me, tied me to a desk with a chain, and hung me in the farrouj position.[1]
They broke all my teeth and nose, and hit me with a gun until my shoulder was
dislocated.”

Mohammad’s case is not unique. Ill-treatment and
torture of detainees are serious problems in Lebanese police stations and in
other pre-trial detention facilities manned by other security institutions.

This report focuses on torture and ill-treatment by the
Internal Security Forces (ISF) which is Lebanon’s main police force, and
in particular the Drug Repression Bureau and members of the ISF who enforce
“morality-related” laws against drug users, sex workers, and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. What these three groups
have in common are their precarious status under Lebanese law as well as social
stigma that renders them particularly vulnerable to police abuse. Human Rights
Watch has reported in the past on ISF ill-treatment of migrants as well as
intelligence service torture of security suspects.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 52 people, including 25 women,
arrested for suspected drug use, sex work, or homosexuality over the past five
years whom ISF members had threatened, humiliated, or tortured.

The most common forms of torture reported to Human Rights
Watch were beatings on different parts of the body with fists, boots, or
implements such as sticks, canes, and rulers. Seventeen former detainees reported
being denied food, water, or medication when they needed it, or of having their
medication confiscated. Nine individuals reported being handcuffed in bathrooms
or in extremely uncomfortable positions for hours at a time. Eleven said ISF
personnel forced them to listen to the screams of other detainees in an effort
to scare them into cooperating or confessing.

Twenty-one women we spoke with reported that police had
subjected them to some form of sexual violence or coercion, ranging from sexual
assault to offering them “favors” (such as cigarettes, food, more
comfortable conditions in their cells, or even a more lenient police report) in
exchange for sex.

According to the experts and former detainees we spoke with,
the police do little to hide their disdain of drug users, sex workers, and LGBT
people. Verbal abuse, degradation, and humiliation appear to be so common that
many victims tended to gloss over them when telling their stories. To them, the
practices were so common that they appeared unremarkable. Physical violence was
not just used to extract confessions but also as a form of punishment,
discipline, and behavioral correction. Sex workers and female drug users
appeared to be at particular risk for sexual assault and blackmail.

The detainees we spoke with experienced torture and
mistreatment at Beirut’s Hobeish police station, Gemmayze police station,
Baabda police station, Msaitbeh police station, Zahleh police station, Ouzai
police station, the Saida police station, police intelligence in Jdeideh, and in pre-trial
detention in Baabda women’s prison. Similar abuses may
occur at other police stations and prisons as well, but we did not research
conditions at those other facilities.

The ill-treatment and torture were accompanied by other key
violations. Interviewees reported police denying them phone calls to family
members, access to lawyers, and medical care when needed. While article 47 of
Lebanon’s Code of Criminal Procedure limits detention without charge to
48 hours, renewable once with permission from the public prosecutor, this limit
is often violated in practice. Additionally, police do not always inform
suspects of the charges brought against them, a violation of international and domestic
law, including article 76 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Lebanon’s authorities are aware of the problem but
have failed to take steps to address it. A high-ranking official in the ISF,
Brigadier Charbel Matar, speaking on behalf of Interior Minister Marwan
Charbel, admitted that torture does take place in investigation rooms and
detention centers. At a public meeting of an EU-funded project that works to
prevent torture and rehabilitate victims, Matar said that “everyone is
responsible” for torture, including police officers and “lawyers
who intervene to pressure a detainee and judges who exert pressure on police
investigators to hurry up or get a confession and turn a blind eye to a
detainee in a miserable health situation that has resulted from beating or
torture.”[2]

Torture and ill-treatment by the ISF are grounded in (1)
laws that are inadequate or badly implemented, (2) a judicial system that puts
too much emphasis on obtaining confessions during investigations, (3) a rampant
culture of impunity, and (4) lack of proper oversight mechanisms.

Even though Lebanon has ratified the Convention against
Torture, the definition of torturein the
Lebanese Penal Codefalls short of the
international standards set out in the convention. For example, the Lebanese
definition limits torture to acts carried out with the purpose of extracting a
confession or obtaining information, ignoring the myriad other reasons
detainees are mistreated while in custody.

Inadequate provisions in the Code of Criminal Procedure
compound the problem. There is no legal guarantee, for example, that a detainee
has access to a lawyer during interrogation by the police.

Even when laws do exist, they are often not implemented
properly. Although detainees have the right to request medical attention, many
of the detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch said this right had been
denied in practice. Twelve detainees interviewed for this report reported that
they had requested to see a doctor during their initial detention at the police
station but that their request had been denied. Twenty-two detainees told Human
Rights Watch that they were brought before investigative judges without the
presence of a lawyer guaranteed to them by law.

The over-reliance on confessions in the investigative
process, coupled with the denial of access to lawyers during the crucial phase
of preliminary questioning by the police, allow for unchecked abuse and
mistreatment of suspects. Twenty-three individuals told Human Rights Watch that
police extracted confessions from them through mental and physical coercion. In
some cases the confessions were false, and in others they amounted to
the only piece of evidence presented to
support charges against them.

In only three cases reviewed in this report did the investigative
judge order an investigation into allegations that confessions were made under
duress.

Oversight of security forces is inadequate and complaints
mechanisms are weak. The mechanisms that do exist, such as the ISF’s
human rights committee, are ineffective, understaffed, and exercise no real
power. A separate complaints mechanism does exist, but it is flawed and
difficult to navigate and follow-up.

How the arrest and initial detention of a person unfold have
a profound effect on the ability of the judicial system to uphold fair trial
standards set forth in both domestic law and in Lebanon’s international
commitments. Confessions extracted through torture, arbitrary detention, and
failure to bring detainees before investigative judges all contribute to
undermining the ability of the judicial system to ensure fair trials.

Access to redress is particularly difficult for members of
vulnerable groups, such as sex workers, drug users, and LGBT people. While
there are mechanisms in place to file formal complaints, logistical, social,
and structural obstacles render the system woefully inadequate to ensure
accountability for wrongdoing.

Twelve individuals told Human Rights Watch that police
officers threatened and warned them outright against reporting. In addition,
five former detainees told Human Rights Watch that investigative judges
dismissed their allegations of mistreatment, intimidation, and abuse without
further inquiries. Of the 49 people we interviewed that alleged ill-treatment,
only 6 filed a complaint. Only two of those interviewed reported that a police
officer was subsequently disciplined.

Members of marginalized social groups face further obstacles
to reporting and redress. Drug users fear exposure of their conduct, LGBT
people fear exposure of their sexual orientation or gender identity, while sex
workers fear exposure of the nature of their work. Simply being identified as a
drug user, sex worker, or LGBT person can lead to negative social consequences.
The ways in which laws that criminalize sex work, homosexuality, and personal
drug use are implemented exacerbate the problem and present a major obstacle to
reporting police abuse. This can only be addressed through a re-examination of
these laws.

The law regulating sex work, which dates from 1931,
stipulates that female sex workers must be registered and must undergo medical
examinations, cannot be virgins, and must be older than 21. Article 7 of the
law stipulates that sex workers can only practice sex work inside brothels, and
article 523 of the Lebanese Penal Code punishes “any person
who practices secret prostitution or facilitates it” with a prison
sentence ranging from one month to one year. Although the law remains on the
books, in practice the government does not issue licenses, leaving virtually
all sex workers vulnerable to arrest for practicing prostitution without being
registered.

Homosexuality is not explicitly outlawed in Lebanon. Rather,
article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code states that “any sexual
intercourse contrary to the order of nature is punishable by up to one year in
prison.” This provision has been used mainly to prosecute people
suspected of homosexuality even though the law does not specify what might
constitute “contrary to the order of nature,” leaving a large
margin of interpretation to individual judges.

Drug use or possession is punishable in Lebanon by up to six
months in prison and a fine. The law does not differentiate between the type of
drugs used. Additionally, individuals that are convicted of selling illegal
drugs or of the loosely defined act of “facilitating the consumption of
drugs in any way” are given harsher prison sentences.

In the last few years, Lebanon has taken a number of steps
to expand and reform the ISF, but these efforts remain inadequate and have not
addressed ongoing abuses by ISF personnel. In 2008, the ISF established a
Human Rights Department tasked with spreading awareness of human rights within
the ISF and conducting trainings and compiling studies on various human rights
issues. In 2011, the ISF also launched a committee to monitor torture in
prisons. While these are welcome developments, these bodies exercise no
effective authority and do not possess any investigative powers.

In January 2011, the ISF launched a new Code of Conduct setting
out standards of behavior and obligations rooted in Lebanese law and international
human rights principles, although its full and proper implementation remains to
be seen.

Over the past few years, donors such as the US, the EU, the
UK, and France have invested significant amounts of money in equipping,
training, and improving the ISF. Many of these programs are focused on training
and equipping the ISF. While human rights are included in the training, the
cases documented in this report give reason for concern as to whether it is
effective.

There have also been other recent positive developments. The
Minister of Justice issued a decree in August 2012 urging a ban on anal
examinations for men suspected of homosexuality, one of the most humiliating
forms of pseudo-scientific investigation. These examinations are medically and
scientifically useless, and also violate international standards against
torture and ill-treatment. Following public outcry at the use of such
examinations after police arrested 36 men for suspected homosexuality in a
theatre in a suburb of Beirut, local civil society groups, with a group called
The Legal Agenda at the helm, successfully lobbied both the syndicate of
doctors as well as the Ministry of Justice to ban the examinations.

Lebanon should uphold its international commitments by
amending its definition of torture and implementing the provisions it committed
to when it signed the Convention against Torture and the convention’s
Optional Protocol, particularly the creation of a “national preventive mechanism,”
an independent body tasked with monitoring detention centers. Most importantly,
Lebanon should be transparent in ensuring accountability for ISF members who commit
abuses, and should create effective and accessible complaints mechanisms to
ensure that happens. It should also revise its Code of Criminal Procedure to better
safeguard the rights of detainees and repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality,
drug use, and sex work.

Methodology

This report is based on 52 interviews with people arrested
for suspected drug use, sex work, or homosexuality. The interviews were
conducted in person in Beirut, Baabda, Tripoli, Zahleh, and Saida between
February and July 2012. Most of the interviews were conducted after the release
of the detainees, with the exception of 19 women arrested for sex work or drug
use, who were interviewed while in pre-trial detention in Baabda women’s
prison. The interviewees were almost evenly split between men and women, and
their ages ranged from the early twenties to the late forties. The time period
of the arrests ranges from 2007 to 2012.

Interviewees were identified through non-governmental
organizations working with drug users, sex workers, and lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender individuals, in addition to human rights groups working on
issues of torture.

The interviews were conducted one on one in private
settings in Arabic by the lead project researcher, assisted by Human Rights
Watch interns.

Human Rights Watch gave no incentives to interviewees to
participate and took care to avoid re-traumatization. Interviewees all gave
their consent to have their stories used for this report while maintaining
their anonymity and confidentiality. Where needed, researchers referred individuals
to other resources.

We also interviewed one official in the ISF, two forensic
doctors working with the ISF, three lawyers representing the detainees, judges
and lawyers active in advocacy against police torture and mistreatment, and NGOs
working with the target groups in this report, such as Skoun, Kafa, The Legal
Agenda, and Dar el Amal. In addition we also met with representatives from
donor countries that have substantial ISF assistance programs, specifically the
US, the UK, and EU.

We have used pseudonyms for all the victims we spoke to, and
in some cases have withheld additional identifying information to protect their
privacy and safety.

I. Recommendations

To the Ministry of Interior

Establish a centralized and accessible system for receiving and
processing complaints of Internal Security Forces (ISF) abuse of suspects or
other malfeasance and ensure that complaints are trackable through unique
complaint numbers.

Ensure that all members of the ISF are clearly identifiable
through name and rank tags on their uniforms.

Ensure that the ISF properly implement the Code of Criminal
Procedure, particularly its limits on pre-trial detention and the requirement
that detainees be promptly brought before investigative judges.

To Investigative Judges and
Other Members of the Judiciary

Thoroughly investigate all allegations of torture and
mistreatment of suspects by members of the ISF, and prosecute offenders to the
full extent of the law.

Overturn all convictions of defendants that were based upon confessions
extracted under duress.

Create and enforce guidelines to ensure that judges deem
inadmissible all confessions and other evidence obtained under torture.

Ensure that investigative judges carry out their roles in
preliminary investigations as required by the Lebanese Code of Criminal
Procedure.

To the Lebanese Government

Immediately prepare and submit
to the UN Committee against Torture an objective assessment of
Lebanon’s efforts to date to implement the Convention against
Torture (CAT), as required by Lebanon’s ratification of the treaty.

Establish a national preventive
mechanism to carry out visits to places of detention, to monitor the
treatment of and conditions for detainees, and to make recommendations
regarding the prevention of ill-treatment, as required by the Optional
Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT).

Establish an independent body
to investigate allegations of torture and ill-treatment by officers of the
ISF.

Adhere to article 22 of CAT
giving the UN CAT committee the authority to look into individual
complaints.

To the Lebanese Parliament

Amend article 401 of the Penal Code to criminalize all forms of
torture and ill-treatment and make Lebanon’s definition of the offenses
consistent with the definition in CAT.

Increase the penalties for torture convictions so that the
sentences defendants receive reflect the gravity of the crime.

Repeal article 534 of the Lebanese penal code, which criminalizes
“any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature.”

Amend article 49 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to explicitly
guarantee suspects the right to a lawyer during police questioning.

Adopt a law authorizing creation of a national preventive mechanism
to monitor detention facilities and combat torture, as required by the OPCAT.

To the US, EU, UK, France, and
Other Countries that Fund the Internal Security Forces

Audit funding and technical assistance provided to the ISF to
ensure that funding is not supporting policies, programs, or practices that
violate international law, including torture and ill-treatment of sex workers, people
who use drugs, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons.

Make aid to the ISF more transparent and develop reporting and
accountability mechanisms to better assess aid spending and effectiveness.

Ensure that aid to the Internal Security Forces supports the
development of internal oversight and accountability mechanisms within the ISF,
including an independent body to investigate allegations of torture and
ill-treatment.

Refrain from funding Internal Security Forces units that are
credibly found to abuse human rights and make resumption of funding to such
units subject to enactment of reforms that guarantee the cessation of such
abuses and accountability for past violations.

II. Background

Lebanon’s Laws on
Homosexuality, Drug Use, and Sex Work

This report focuses on police abuse against three
populations: drug users, sex workers, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) people. Members of these groups are easy targets for police
abuse from the moment police suspect “wrongdoing” through their arrest,
detention, and police investigation of the case. Police are not immune to the
prejudice and social stigma attached to these groups. As described in this
report, police often arrest individuals arbitrarily and without evidence on the
grounds of what the police themselves describe to be “suspicious behavior.”
Police may even arrest individuals on the grounds of specific appearances
ascribed to members of these groups—for example, because someone
“looks gay” or “looks suspicious” in the eyes of the
police.

To varying degrees, sex workers, drug users, and LGBT people
are marginalized socially and institutionally. The combination of such
marginalization and laws that criminalize sex work, drug use, and homosexuality
in the Lebanese Penal Code makes members of these groups reluctant to file
complaints against police members, which creates an environment in which police
can abuse them with impunity.

Victims sometimes choose not to file complaints due to
direct threats from the police and other times due to fear of retaliation—police
can arbitrarily re-arrest them at any time. Another factor is fear of public
exposure of their behavior, work, or identities as drug users, sex workers, or
LGBT people. Sometimes individuals simply lack faith in the ability of the
criminal justice system to deliver justice—part of a broader problem of
trust in public institutions in Lebanon. The strong view expressed by many
victims of police abuse we interviewed is that the police exert complete
control over their lives and may act with impunity and that they are powerless
to defend themselves against police abuse and mistreatment.

The police do little to hide their disdain of sex workers,
drug users, and LGBT people. Victims say that physical violence by police is
common and is often used as a form of punishment, discipline, and behavioral
correction. Verbal abuse, degradation, and humiliation appear to be so
widespread that many victims tended not to mention them when telling their
stories, viewing such behavior as unremarkable. For members of these vulnerable
social groups, the police not only represent law enforcement, but also act as
judge and jury in many ways. As described below, Lebanon’s laws
facilitate such abuse.

Homosexuality

Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code states that “any
sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature is punishable by up to one
year in prison.” Homosexuality is not explicitly outlawed but rather is typically
assumed to be “contrary to nature.” The provision does not
define what might constitute “nature,” leaving a large margin of
interpretation to individual judges, who have used it to prosecute people
suspected of homosexuality.

One case that received considerable
media attention demonstrates how the law can also be interpreted otherwise. In
February 2007, a police patrol arrested two men sitting in a parked car in
Batroun, a city in the north of Lebanon. The police suspected the two men of
engaging in homosexual sex. The presiding judge, Mounir Suleiman, ordered a
halt to the criminal investigation into the behavior of the men on the basis
that the evidence was weak and, more importantly, on his interpretation of the
concept of “contrary to the order of nature.” The judge noted that
what is considered unnatural is closely linked to “the mood of a society
and its traditions,” and emphasized the willingness of society to accept
new or emerging “norms of nature.”[3] He added:

Man is part of nature and one [of] its elements and one
[of] its cells and no one can say that any act of his acts or behavior is
contradicting nature even if the act is criminal or offending simply because
these are the rules of nature. If the sky is raining during summertime or if we
have hot weather during winter or if a tree is giving unusual fruits, all these
can be according to and in harmony with nature and are part of its rules
themselves.[4]

Although article 534 of the Penal Code by its terms applies
only to acts of sexual intercourse, however ill-defined, police have invoked
the law when arresting individuals based solely on their appearance or
mannerisms without evidence of any sexual act, a reflection of stereotyped and
prejudiced assumptions about sexual orientation. Human rights lawyer Nizar
Saghieh conducted a study for the Lebanese LGBT organization Helem in which he
examined how article 534 is used in Lebanese courts to prosecute men suspected
of homosexuality. In his report he highlights a case from 2009 in which a woman
reported her son to the police for suspected “homosexuality”
because he was “acting like a woman.”[5]
This was enough for the public prosecutor to arrest and interrogate the young
man and force him to submit to an anal examination. Anal examinations have no
scientific or medical validity. In this case, the state-appointed medical
examiner decided that there was no conclusive evidence to prove that homosexual
sex had occurred. According to Saghieh, the young man was indicted anyway
based on the public prosecutor’s assumptions about the man’s
behavior and mannerisms. The judge eventually dismissed the charges for lack of
evidence. Saghieh uses this case to demonstrate the danger of the police and
the public prosecutor acting on prejudice toward certain behaviors,
appearances, and lifestyles.[6]

Saghieh’s study also explored how the detention
procedures used by police against suspected homosexuals violate Lebanese
criminal procedure laws and pre-emptively punish men suspected of homosexuality
through lengthy periods of temporary detention.[7] Saghieh
reviewed over 50 court cases and concluded that persons suspected of “unnatural”
sexual relations are commonly detained without charge for an unnecessarily long
period, exceeding the 48-hour maximum stipulated by article 47 of the Code of
Criminal Procedure, even in cases where the evidence is extremely weak.

Article 534 is also sometimes used as a corrective measure
by parents unhappy with their children’s sexual orientation, illustrating
the pernicious synergy that can exist between social stigma and discriminatory
laws. Walid, 24, told Human Rights Watch that his mother told the police to
arrest him and detain him for a night at the police station in order to
“scare” him out of being gay, a request he says the police complied
with.[8]

Sex Work

Sex work is highly regulated in Lebanon. The law regulating
sex work, which dates from 1931, stipulates that female sex workers must be
registered and must undergo medical examinations, cannot be virgins, and must
be older than 21. Article 7 of the 1931 law further stipulates that they can
only practice sex work inside brothels. Article 523 of the Lebanese Penal Code
punishes “any person who practices secret prostitution or
facilitates it” with a prison sentence ranging from one month to one
year, and the law is applied quite rigorously. Male sex workers are not
addressed in the law.

Since the late 1960s the government has stopped issuing new
licenses for brothels. This means that in practice most sex work is unlicensed and
illegal. “Super Night Clubs” have emerged to bypass these
restrictions. These institutions, halfway between brothels and strip clubs,
provide a space for clients and sex workers to meet, but sex takes place
off-site, and therefore they do not require a brothel license. They form the
crux of a regulated sex industry that currently employs an estimated 2,500
women, mainly from Eastern Europe. Women enter and stay in the country on six-month
“artist” visas. The Super Night Club industry is regulated and
monitored by the General Security Department on the basis of administrative
directives. They are aware that the women employed engage in sex work, as
evidenced by the fact that they require the women to undergo periodic HIV/AIDS
and STI testing. According to the UN special rapporteur on trafficking in persons,
the General Security Department issues “around 5,000 artist visas every
year, meaning that at any given point there are approximately 2,500 ‘artists’
in the country,” as the visas are granted for six month periods.[9]
In her report, the special rapporteur adds:

In an attempt to shield the regulated sex industry from
public opprobrium, the General Security Department also tries to reduce the
women’s public visibility and limit their contacts with the general
population. It would seem that the rule limiting the women’s stay
to six months serves mainly this purpose. Furthermore, the women are only
allowed to reside in hotels authorized by General Security and must not leave
the hotel between 5 a.m. and 1 p.m. If they are sick, they may only
absent themselves from work if a physician accredited by the General Security
Department diagnoses them as unfit. These rules play into the hands of
exploitative impresarios who rely on strategies of isolation to subdue their
victims.[10]

By contrast to the predominance of Eastern European women in
the Super Night Clubs, workers in the unregulated sector of the sex work
industry are mainly poor Lebanese and migrant women from Arab countries such as
Syria and Iraq as well as some countries in Asia and Africa. Poverty, the
illegal nature of their work, and their precarious migrant status all leave
them particularly vulnerable to police abuse.

Drug Use

Drug use or possession is punishable by up to six months in
prison and a fine of Lebanese Lira 100,000 (approximately US$66). The law does
not differentiate between the types of drugs used.[11]
Additionally, individuals convicted of selling illegal drugs or
“facilitating the use of illegal consumption of drugs for others in any
way” are given prison sentences between six months and three years and a
fine of LL100,000 to LL500,000 (approximately US$66 to US$332).[12]
According to statistics from the Drug Repression Bureau, as reported by Skoun,
a Lebanese addiction treatment center, 2,228 drug users were arrested in 2009
and almost half of them were aged 18-25.[13]

The “facilitation” of drug use is an ill-defined
concept, and could potentially include simply using drugs in the company of
others. “Facilitation” significantly raises the sentence for many
drug users. Seventeen drug users told Human Rights Watch that police often
tried to manipulate them into admitting to facilitation after they were
arrested for use or possession just because they used drugs around their
friends that joined them.

Lebanon’s drug law, passed in 1997 stipulates that
drug users have the choice between treatment and incarceration. The law
includes a number of provisions that treat drug use as a public health issue,
but other provisions do not. And provisions that take a public health approach
have not been fully implemented. According to a study by Skoun, 40 percent of
the judges interviewed indicated that they never issued a primary or final
verdict requiring the individual to commit to treatment as an alternative to
incarceration; only 4 percent indicated that they had done so regularly.[14]

Article 183 of the drug law allows drug users the option of presenting
themselves before a state-administered Drug Addiction Committee (DAC), a body
tasked with referring drug users to government-affiliated treatment centers and
responsible for following up on the progress of their treatment. The DAC is
comprised of a judge, a representative of the Ministry of Social Affairs, a
doctor from the Ministry of Public Health, a representative of the Drug
Repression Bureau, an expert drawn from private institutions, and other
individuals recommended by relevant bodies.[15]
Additionally, article 200 states that the Ministry of Public Health should
create at least one specialized treatment center.

Further, article 200 requires the Ministry of Social Affairs
to pay a monthly stipend to the dependents of drug users should their treatment
impede their ability to support their families.

The law stipulates that treatment should be completely
funded by the state. Should the drug user stop treatment for any reason, the committee
should inform the prosecution in order that it restart the trial; however,
should the user recover, the committee should issue an attestation that leads
to charges being dropped.

In practice, the committee is not functional and does not
have an operational budget. Despite this, some judges act on their own
initiative and refer drug users to NGOs specialized in drug addiction treatment.
According to Nadya Mikdashi, executive director of Lebanese drug addiction NGO
Skoun, such referrals are a welcome attempt by judges to uphold the law but
they are not done within a structured referral system nor are they sustainable as
there is no protocol for communication between the courts and NGOs. There are
fewer than 10 NGO rehabilitation centers in the country and they are mostly
centralized in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.[16] Most
drug users are simply given jail time, usually from three to six months.[17]
In reality, even if drug users do go to rehab, it is not guaranteed that
prosecutions will be dropped.

The weak legal framework and the lack of proper
implementation of the law leaves the police a wide margin to subject drug users
to various forms of abuse. For example, according to statistics provided by the
ISF’s Drug Enforcement Bureau to Skoun, around one third of drug users
are arrested through denunciation by other arrested drug users, and our
research suggests that such denunciations are often extracted by force.[18]

The criminal records of individuals convicted of drug use
are often an obstacle to gaining employment after release from prison. Ibrahim
was arrested nine times between 1989 and 2007 and has been in treatment and
drug-free since then. Ibrahim has been out of work for five years, with
potential employers refusing to give him a job because of his criminal record.
Ibrahim told Human Rights Watch that he could pay a US$600 bribe to clean up
his record, but he does not have that kind of money. “It’s a
vicious circle I’m trapped in,” he said. “I will forever be
punished for using drugs in the past.”[19]

Lebanese Security
Forces

The Internal Security Forces (ISF) are Lebanon’s main
police forces composed of administrative and operational branches. The ISF
falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior. The main ISF
department implicated in the cases of abuse and torture documented in this
report are the Judicial Police, particularly the Drug Repression Bureau (DRB) unit.

The Judicial Police is the main body responsible for the
arrest and detention of accused individuals and also for the investigation of
crimes. Technically, the Judicial Police operates under the jurisdiction of the
public prosecutor’s office, the investigative judge, and the courts. The
reality is very different. As this report and others show, detainees are often
subject to the whims of judicial police officers, the latter facing little or
no oversight or accountability.[20]

The DRB is a branch of the Judicial Police responsible for
investigating drug-related crimes. Our research shows that the DRB uses torture
to extract confessions, to force detainees to name other users or dealers, and
even as a form of punishment. The DRB has four detention and interrogation
centers. The central station is in Beirut (Hobeish police station, which also
houses the vice unit); a second is in southern Lebanon in the city of Saida; a
third is in the Bekaa valley in the city of Zahleh, and the fourth is in the
northern city of Tripoli.

The legal procedure governing the arrest of suspects is
outlined in Lebanon’s Code of Criminal Procedure. The public
prosecutor must order the arrest, which is then carried out by the Judicial Police.
The suspect must be brought before an investigative judge to be charged within
48 hours, renewable once on order from the public prosecutor. The investigative
judge decides whether the suspect should be released or detained for the
duration of the investigation or trial, a decision which the suspect may
appeal. A suspect charged with a minor offense may be detained in this manner
for two months, renewable once; a suspect charged with a serious offense may be
held for up to six months, also renewable once. However, all suspects previously
sentenced to a prison term of a year or more may be held for an unlimited
period of time.

The ISF suffers from a lack of professionalism. Police cadets
receive a basic military training and limited theoretical information with no
practical training in methods of investigation or interrogation. This is
insufficient compared to the actual needs. Clear standard operating procedures
for investigation and standardized, structured reporting forms for
investigation procedures have only recently been developed in the framework of
an EU-funded project and have yet to be widely applied. According to an
official at the European Union delegation in Beirut who has been working with
the ISF since 2007, there is a real need for such standardized procedures
because much of the evidence submitted by the ISF is rejected by the judiciary
because the work is poor or shows procedural gaps.[21]
Additionally, unstructured reporting makes it difficult for a judge to exploit
findings in large investigations. Despite US- and EU-funded programs to train
the ISF in proper and scientific investigation and interrogation techniques, prevailing
culture and practices within the ISF and the prosecution still focuses on
interrogation and on pushing for a confession from the suspects, rather than
proving their guilt on the basis of objective and scientific evidence.

Torture in Lebanese Law

Lebanon ratified the UN Convention against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) in 2000 and the Optional
Protocol to the CAT (OPCAT) in 2008. However, the definition of torture in the Lebanese Penal Codefalls
short of the international standards set out in the convention. Accordingly,
the Working Group on Lebanon’s Universal Periodic Review before the UN
Human Rights Council in January 2011 specifically recommended that Lebanon make
several revisions to its definition of torture and criminalize all forms of
torture and ill-treatment.[22]

The Lebanese Penal Code treats torture as a minor crime and
sets forth an overly restrictive definition of the offense. Article 401 of the
Penal Code states,

Anyone who inflicts violent practices
not permitted by the law against another person with the intention to extract a
confession of a crime or information related to it will be imprisoned for three
months up to three years. If the violent practices have led to illness or
wounds, the minimum period of imprisonment is one year.[23]

The phrase “violent practices not permitted by the
law” unduly limits what can constitute torture. Additionally, according
to article 401, violence can only amount to torture when it is used to extract
confessions, excluding the use of torture to punish, intimidate, coerce, or as
a form of discrimination. And the maximum prison term of three years treats the
crime as a relatively minor one, deserving of a relatively light penalty.

The shortcomings of Lebanon’s definition are clear
when viewed next to the comprehensive definition set forth in the UN Convention
against Torture:

Any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person
for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person, information or a
confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is
suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third
person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain
or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or
acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official
capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in
or incidental to lawful sanctions.[24]

While another provision of Lebanese law invalidates all
statements extracted under duress, that provision is often violated in
practice, as detailed in this report.[25]

Nineteen cases documented in this report show evidence that
police use torture as well as cruel and degrading treatment to punish suspects
for “immoral” acts such as drug use or various sexual offences.
Seven people told Human Rights Watch that police officers who beat them said
that they wanted to “teach them a lesson.” The Lebanese definition
of torture is too narrow to apply to such cases.

When a Human Rights Watch researcher filed a complaint
against an ISF officer for harassment and intimidation that the researcher
herself had experienced at the hands of the ISF, the head of the Msaitbeh
police station told her that “it’s normal for a police officer to
slap a detainee around—it’s part of the job. You, human rights
people, turn everything into a huge deal.” Such sentiments make a mockery
of the ISF’s Code of Conduct, which explicitly states that “police
members will not practice, incite, or disregard any act of torture or any
cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment during investigations and during the
execution of their missions.”[26]

III. Findings

Physical Abuse and
Torture

Human Rights Watch interviewed 52 individuals that were
beaten, threatened, or humiliated at the moment of arrest or during
investigation. According to the victims, the police did this for a variety of
reasons, including to obtain information, to force a confession, to incriminate
others, to punish or discipline detainees, and to ensure that victims of
violence did not speak out against the abuse they experienced at the hands of
the police. The most common reason for the torture was police efforts to obtain
confessions by force.[27]

The forms of torture reported to Human Rights Watch included
beatings on different parts of the body with fists, boots, or implements such
as sticks, canes, rulers, or other devices. Eleven individuals said that
officers in police stations and detention centers forced detainees to listen to
the screams of other detainees being beaten in order to scare them into
cooperating or confessing.

Nabil, 32, was arrested by officers of the Drug Repression
Bureau and taken to Zahleh police station in 2008 for drug use and detained for
seven days. He told Human Rights Watch that he was tortured during his
detention.[28] He
said,

I was beaten for about an hour—punched and kicked.
The police officer beating me kept repeating his name to me, telling me never
to forget it. I never did. He stopped beating me only when I started crying and
screaming his name over and over. After the investigation I was taken to a cell
with another man. An officer asked us how we liked our coffee, so the man said
he liked it black, and I asked for sugar. That’s when he told the other
officer “One of them likes it bitter; the other sweet. What shall I get
them?” That’s when they took us out of the cell and started beating
us with thick electricity cables. The next day I heard another police officer
talk about the beatings, saying, “the guys were bored; they were just
having some fun with them.”[29]

Tamara, a transsexual woman, fled from her family in the
south of Lebanon to Tripoli, a city in the north. Male members of her family
visited her apartment several times in an attempt to convince her to return to
the family home. Tamara told Human Rights Watch that when her neighbors saw men
visiting her, they complained to the police that she was a sex worker and that
the men coming to her house were her clients. That was enough for police to
arrest her in early 2010, even though a preliminary investigation would have
shown that these men were family members, not clients. The police took Tamara
to Hobeish police station in Beirut. She said,

I saw blood and people being beaten, and I was terrified.
They took me into an office and three police officers started hitting me:
punching me with their fists and kicking me. They didn’t even tell me
what I did or why I was there. When they found out I was transsexual, they
started asking me really personal questions in very insulting ways. They asked
me how I get fucked and told me that if I denied that I have anal sex with men
they’ll imprison me. I was so scared and did not want to get beaten
anymore that I said yes to everything. Every time I denied something I would
get hit, what other option did I have?[30]

While Tamara was initially arrested for sex work, a Lebanese
court found her guilty of “unnatural sexual acts,” and sentenced
her to three months in prison. By the time her trial started, she had already
spent five months in pre-trial detention.[31]

At the end of 2010, police arrested Carla, 26, for drug
possession at a gas station in Sin el Fil, a suburb to the east of Beirut while
she was in a stolen car with three men. They were taken to police intelligence
in Jdeideh, where Carla says that they were beaten immediately upon arrival.
She described how they used the infamous farrouj
(roast chicken) torture technique, in which the victim is suspended by the feet
with hands tied together to an iron bar passed under the knees.[32]
She explained,

They farroujed
me and beat me with canes until my whole body was swollen and I was bloodied.
They pushed me down a set of stairs and punched me in the stomach. They refused
to allow my mother to see me. I stayed there for five days in a solitary
confinement cell. They blindfolded my eyes and forced me to sign some papers. I
have no idea what was written on them. I began to go through really bad
withdrawal—I was in so much pain. I begged the police to buy me my
medication and showed them my prescription, but they refused. Instead they took
me out of the room, handcuffed and blindfolded me, and hit me incessantly. They
would hit me and tell me to say what they wanted me to say.[33]

When Human Rights Watch spoke to Carla in April 2012,
approximately one and a half years after her arrest, she was in Baabda prison still
awaiting trial for drug possession and theft. The UN special rapporteur on
torture has recognized that withdrawal symptoms can cause severe pain and
suffering, and that the use of withdrawal symptoms to obtain confessions, or
for any purposes cited in article 1 of the CAT, might be torture.[34]
According to the special rapporteur,

Drug users are particularly vulnerable when deprived of
their liberty. One of the questions in this context concerns withdrawal symptoms
and to what extent they may qualify as torture or ill-treatment. There can be
no doubt that withdrawal symptoms can cause severe pain and suffering if not
alleviated by appropriate medical treatment, and the potential for abuse of
withdrawal symptoms, in particular in custody situations, is evident. In a 2003
case, without specifically stating that the woman died from withdrawal, the
European Court of Human Rights found a violation of the prohibition of inhuman
or degrading treatment or punishment based on “the responsibility owed by
prison authorities to provide the requisite medical care for detained persons.”Moreover, if withdrawal symptoms are used for any of the purposes cited in
definition of torture enshrined in article 1 of the Convention against Torture,
this might amount to torture.[35]

In 2011, seven police officers from the Drug Repression
Bureau (DRB) raided Ahmad’s house while he was in the shower. The raid
was motivated by a report by Ahmad’s girlfriend who worked as an
informant for the Hobeish branch of the DRB.[36] Ahmad
explained what happened during the raid:

I was still in the shower when one of them hit me on the
back of the head with the butt of his rifle. I fell to the ground, and all of
them started kicking me. When they were done kicking me, they asked me if I
knew who they were. When I replied, “The police,” they started
kicking me again saying that they were from Hobeish and started asking me where
my drugs were. One of the officers, well-known at Hobeish, threatened me and
said if I didn’t speak, he would “fill my mouth with my own
blood.”[37]

In 2010, members of Hizbollah’s security personnel
detained Zahra, 24, accusing her of carrying cocaine, and handed her over to
the police. She told Human Rights Watch that in the Ouzai police station,
officers blindfolded her and threatened to hit her with a belt if she refused to
confess to dealing drugs. She told Human Rights Watch that they put electricity
cables on her feet, threatening to electrocute her if she did not confess and
tell them to whom she sold drugs. “It didn’t matter what I said,
they would hit me, threaten me, and write whatever they wanted. They made me
sign something I didn’t even read. I needed food and medicine for my
bruises, but they refused to give me either,” she said. Two days later,
they took her to Hobeish police station, where she spent four days being
interrogated. She was then taken to Baabda police station, where she says an
officer beat her with a cane on her feet and told her he would let her call her
brother if she let him touch her sexually. When she was transferred to Baabda
prison for pre-trial detention, she told the head of the prison what had
happened, but nothing came of it. Zahra has been in pre-trial detention for two
years.[38]

Mohammad, 30, spent a total of 11 days in Zahleh police
station in 2008 after police arrested him on charges of drug use. He told Human
Rights Watch that he was tortured, and confessed under severe beating. He said,
“They took me to interrogation naked, poured cold water on me, tied me to
a desk with a chain, and hung me in the farrouj
position. They broke my teeth and nose, and hit me with a gun until my shoulder
was dislocated. At one point there were around 10 people beating me
simultaneously. [When I was released] I had to pay over $5,000 in medical bills.”[39]

Mohammad’s case is one of the few documented instances
in which an internal investigation into allegations of torture led to
punishment. He says that the abusive first lieutenant in charge of his
interrogation was demoted as a result. Despite this apparent admission by the
state that torture was used in the investigation, Mohammad was still sentenced
and spent five months in Zahleh prison—a sentence based on a confession
obtained through torture, which the judge had acknowledged.[40]

Many of those interviewed by Human Rights Watch described
how the police had attempted to force confessions, even fake ones, from them.
Joseph recounts how, in 2007, police arrested him from his home for drug use,
straight from his bed:

They started beating me while I was still in bed. When I
asked them what was happening they didn’t answer. They just beat me more
then took to me to Zahleh police station. I was there for three days, and every
day they would beat me for three to five hours, trying to force me to give out
names of people I used to take drugs with. They have the craziest methods of
beating you up in a way that wouldn’t leave bruises. They would hit me
incessantly with the Yellow Pages, the thickest book they had. The most horrifying
thing they did was when they [hung me by my legs and] took a long piece of
wood, placed it under my knees and handcuffed my hands underneath it. They left
me like that for 3 hours; I couldn't feel my legs when they untied me. On the
third day they blindfolded me and forced me to sign the forged confession
paper. When I requested to read the confession they started beating me up
again.[41]

Nadim’s Story

In October 2010, police arrested Nadim when they could not
find his brother, whom they suspected of drug dealing. When they found no
evidence that Nadim had engaged in drug dealing, he says, they changed the charge
to homosexuality.[42]

Three plainclothes officers had initially approached Nadim
while he was sitting at the foot of his building with the employees of a nearby
women’s hairdresser’s shop. Nadim’s experience, detailed
below, highlights many of the issues discussed in this report: arbitrary arrest,
physical violence, intimidation, humiliation, and a forced confession.

Nadim recounts his story as follows:

They asked me about my brother. I told them that I
hadn’t spoken to him in years—we are not on good terms; the
neighbors can attest to that. They accused me of dealing drugs. I denied it, so
one of the officers hit me hard across the face. He then accused me of having a
gun and covering for my brother, just crazy accusations out of nowhere. He hit
me more, handcuffed me, and dragged me to my house and searched it without a
warrant. Of course, when I asked if they had one, I just got punched as an
answer. The officer just kept hitting me the entire time, on my face, on my
back. They put me in the back of the police car and took me to Hobeish [police
station]. I overheard [one of the officers]… on the phone speaking to
someone, telling them to tell my brother that they have me and that he should
leave Beirut because if he finds him he will shoot him in the face.

The intimidation and the beatings never stopped. In Hobeish,
the officer told me if my drug test came out positive he would beat me
senseless. When the results came back, he asked the officer carrying them
whether it was positive. The other officer raised his eyebrows to indicate that
it wasn’t. He assumed I didn’t see that and said, “Oh,
positive for coke and heroin?” as if to justify beating me more. He took
me into a room and made me crawl under the bed to humiliate me.

He then asked me why I had a condom on me. I asked him in
turn whether it was illegal to carry a condom, so he hit me again. When he
asked me why I had messages and names of gay men on my phone, I asked him
whether it was illegal to speak to gay men. He hit me again so hard my eye
split and I began bleeding. I begged him to stop hitting my face but this egged
him on further and he hit me even harder. He forced me to sign a confession
that I have sex with men, all the while hurling punches and abuse at me. He
then made me take off all my clothes and looked at me, told me I’m a
faggot, insulted me, threatened me.

After a while another officer came in and made me take off
all my clothes again, hit me, and insulted me. He tried to get information out
of me about other gay men or pimps or prostitutes, and even asked me whether I
pay for sex or get paid for it. Whenever I would deny their accusations I would
get beaten over and over. I then asked to be able to make a phone call, but he
refused and took me back to my cell.

The next day, two more men came in and interrogated me
again. By this time the drug issue was dropped, the case was now about
homosexuality. I was allowed a phone call this time, so I called the LGBT
rights organization Helem. The officer took the phone from me and told them
that a lawyer is not allowed in Hobeish during interrogation, and if they
wanted to see me they should go to the public prosecutor’s office.

When I told the interrogating officer that I was forced to
confess to having sex under duress, he got a thick electricity cable and
whipped my palms. He then said that he would get a forensic doctor to check me,
but that I would have to pay. I didn’t have any money so I didn’t
end up paying him, but if I had, they probably would just have pocketed it.

I asked him to write down [the name of the officer who]
had beat me into confessing, but he said he wouldn’t and warned me not to
speak about it, threatening that if I did I would regret it for the rest of my
life.

He kept intimidating me, trying to get me to confess again.
He lied to me, saying that if I confessed it would be just a minor crime, but
if I continued to deny it and the anal examination turned out positive it would
become a felony and I would be in jail for three years.

The exam turned out negative, and so they had no choice but
to release me without charge. They had no evidence of anything. Still, they
told me that they would release me only on condition that I become an informant
for them and snitch on my brother and on other drug dealers, users, gay men,
and prostitutes.[43]

Cruel, Inhuman, and
Degrading Treatment

Twenty-one women detained for sex work or drug use told
Human Rights Watch that they had experienced some form of sexual violence.
Seventeen individuals reported being denied food, water, and medication when
they needed it, or of having their medication confiscated. Nine reported being
handcuffed in bathrooms or in extremely uncomfortable positions for hours at a
time.

Threats by police were commonplace. Almost all those who
spoke to Human Rights Watch said that they were threatened with physical
violence, with five reporting that police threatened to physically harm their
families as a form of retaliation or punishment. Interviewees told Human Rights
Watch that police regularly used abusive language, that it was expected. Women
interviewees reported sexually abusive language.

While Ramzy was driving through an area known to be a
meeting place for gay men one night in September 2010, a young man flagged him
down and indicated that he wanted to have sex with him. Ramzy told Human Rights
Watch that after the man got into his car, another man came up to the car
window, grabbed his shirt, and slapped him. The young man sitting next to him
began beating him as well. Ramzy assumed he was being robbed as they dragged
him into the back of a civilian car where one of the men punched him in the
face.[44]

At that point, he still did not know that the men were
police officers or that he was being arrested. He only learned that when the
men took him to Hobeish police station where they confiscated his pants and
ordered him to do 10 sit-ups naked.[45] He told
Human Rights Watch,

I looked well-off, so I didn’t get beaten up or
anything [after I got to the station]. My other cellmates did though, including
one gay guy in his forties who was also entrapped in a similar manner. I stayed
in detention for a week. They questioned me for about four hours, and the
investigators kept trying to twist my story. I ended up signing a statement
that I did not entirely agree with.[46]

Some police stations now have cameras installed in an effort
to monitor police behavior. However, as illustrated by the experience of Ahmad,
44, arrested in 2011 for drug use, police officers who are intent on using
violence have found a way around that. He said,

Whenever I’d hear the phrase “come stand
here,” I knew it was code for “come here so we can beat you up”
outside the view of the camera. That’s how it would happen in the station
if they weren’t satisfied with the beating they gave me on the way there.
They made me stand in the corner for six hours without being allowed to speak.
If I opened my mouth at all, I would get beaten.

Officers would visit me one at a time, one would threaten
me with violence and one would be nice to me asking me to cooperate. Good-cop/bad-cop
style: first they beat you; then they psychologically terrorize you.[47]

Ahmad was one of the few individuals interviewed by Human
Rights Watch who complained to the investigative judge about his treatment by
the police. He reported that he showed the judge the bruises on his back and on
his legs 27 days after his arrest. Ahmad says that he does not know what
happened to his complaint and that he has no way of following up.[48]

Sexual Abuse and Gender-Based
Violence

Human Rights Watch interviewed 25 women who had been
detained for possession of drugs or for sex work. Twenty-one of those women
told Human Rights Watch that they experienced some form of sexual violence by
the police. This abuse included unwanted touching or groping, sexual assault,
and rape. Women reported that they were blackmailed for sex in exchange for
drugs or promises of better treatment or being set free.

Sexual Abuse of Drug Users

Fadwa told Human Rights Watch she was sexually assaulted by
police. In the summer of 2008, the police caught her and a female friend using
drugs in the bathroom at a large outdoor party and used their positions as
police officers to force them to have sex with them.[49]
Fadwa recounts her story as follows:

Two officers followed us and went into the other bathroom
stall and saw what we were doing because they climbed on the toilet and peeked
at us from above. They told us to get out and led us out aggressively by our
hands.

They took us to a closed space in the event venue, a bit
far out where no one could see. The space was separated into two different
rooms. One officer went with me and the other one went with my friend. That's
how they separated us in order to “investigate.”

He asked me about the drugs then took them and put them in
his pocket. As I was answering him, he kissed me on the lips so I pushed him
away. That’s when he asked me, “Why, do you have a
boyfriend?” I didn’t, but thought that might protect me, so I said
yes and told him that my boyfriend was here with me.

It didn’t matter though. He asked for my number so
that he could see me later on and dialed my number to check whether the number
I gave him was right. He kissed me again and grabbed my breast so I pushed him
away, once again.

I told him that I wanted to see my friend, so I went into
the other room. The officer who was there told my friend to leave and the
officer that was with me left as well, leaving me alone with the other
policeman.

He asked me where I got the drugs from and did a
“full body search.” It was humiliating, I felt so violated. He put
his hands on my breasts and said that he wanted to check if I was hiding
anything in my bra. I didn’t know at the time that he had no right to
search me.

I forcefully took his hand off my breast, so he sat on the
stairs, spread his legs and pulled me to him. He put his hand in my pants and
touched my ass. I told him I wouldn’t sleep with him, and that I was a
virgin.

When I was leaving he pushed me to the wall and started
really being aggressive. He unzipped his pants and pushed my neck towards his
erect penis so that I would give him a blow job so I told him I couldn’t
do that because I have herpes and that if I gave him a blow job I’d
transmit the infection to him. That still didn’t deter him. He grabbed my
hand and put it on his penis and forced me to give him a hand job while he had
one hand on my ass and the other hand on my breasts.

As soon as he was “finished” I ran away while
he was fixing his clothes.

The next day the officer who was first
with me in the first room called me. He kept calling me for a week asking to
see me. I kept saying no to him, and then one day I yelled at him, and he never
called back.

Rather than lodge a formal complaint, she chose to use her
family’s connections with high ranking members of the Internal Security
Forces to discipline the police officer “off the record.” Fadwa
said that she later found out that senior officers had him beaten up. When
asked why she did not lodge a formal complaint, Fadwa said that the risk of
being prosecuted for drugs if she complained was too great, so she saw her
options as either keeping quiet, getting revenge through informal channels, or
filing a formal complaint and risk going to prison.[50]

Nawal, 29, also told Human Rights Watch she was sexually
assaulted by police. In July 2012, Nawal was arrested by a military police officer
late at night in the Ashrafieh district of Beirut following an altercation with
a man who was harassing her. She said she was taken to the military police station
in the Mathaf area, where the officers found she was carrying pills without a
prescription. She was kept overnight at the military police station because,
they told her, there was no space available at the Hobeish police station,
where she was supposed to be transferred. The next day she was taken to Baabda police
station, where a police officer sexually assaulted her. She said,

At the time there was only one police officer at the
station. He asked me if someone had searched me and led me by the hand next to
the bathroom. He ran his hands all over me, put them inside my bra and my
underwear, and forced his fingers inside me. I feel ashamed, but I was too
scared and weak to protest. Later, when the shift changed, another police
officer followed me into the bathroom when I went to wash my face. He cornered
me and took off his pants and forced me to touch him. I was crying but did as
he said.[51]

Sexual Abuse of Sex Workers

Sex workers are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault
and harassment. In March 2012, Abeer was arrested for allegedly engaging in sex
work out of a cafe in Hayy el Sellom, a poor district in the southern suburbs
of Beirut. Abeer told Human Rights Watch that she was arrested for no reason
and has since been held in Baabda prison awaiting trial.[52]
Abeer told Human Rights Watch,

I didn’t understand why I was arrested and shoved
into the car. One of the officers told me it was because I’m a prostitute
and not to lie about it or he’ll kill me. I started to cry, I just
didn’t understand what happened. A few years ago I was arrested for sex
work, but that is over, this time I really wasn’t doing anything. When we
got to Hobeish [police station] I was slapped around and insulted and thrown in
a cell with other women. A police officer in civilian clothes came into the
room and tried to get someone, anyone, to have sex with him. He would try to
touch us, grab our breasts, at first telling us that if we let him, he’d
bring us cigarettes. When he touched me, I pushed him away and then he got more
forceful, squeezing my breasts really hard and yelling at me. When I screamed,
he put his hand over my mouth and hit me hard across the face.

The next day another officer interrogated me, and I told
him that I didn’t know why I was in detention. He made fun of me and told
me to shut up and sign a paper. I don’t read, so I don’t even know
what was on it. They kept me there for four days, and I don’t even know
why.[53]

Another woman, Gharam, told Human Rights Watch that she was
raped by a police officer in the Gemmeyze police station in February 2012. She
was arrested after police detained her daughter for sex work; she was charged
with facilitating her daughter’s prostitution activities.[54]
She said,

I stayed in Gemmeyze station for three days and they
treated me and my daughter very badly. One of the officers told me to show him
how I set my daughter up with clients and the others started laughing. We are
poor; I don’t have a husband; we have nothing to eat—what could we
do? During my time there one of the officers came to me at night and told me
that if I didn’t let him sleep with me, I’d go to jail for 10 years
and my daughter for even longer. I was so scared that I let him. The next day I
was transferred to the Baabda station where I spent another three days before
going to Baabda prison. I didn’t tell anyone what happened, I was too
scared. He had threatened me to stay quiet. I’ve been here since
February, and I don’t have money for a lawyer. I have no idea where my
daughter is. Why am I still here?[55]

Soumaya, a sex worker who has been in pretrial detention in
Baabda prison for nine months, told Human Rights Watch that it was expected
that police officers would try to have sex with women arrested for
prostitution.[56] She
explained,

It’s normal. They don’t see us as human beings.
They know that we are poor, that we probably don’t have families, and that
no one asks about us. We’re easy to take advantage of. I was arrested
three times in the past five years. Every time a police officer would come to
the cell and try something with me. At first I protested, I fought back, but
then I understood that it’s useless. If you want to be treated well, you
have to have sex with them. If you do that, they will take care of you.
Otherwise you could get beaten, insulted, even raped. If you let them sleep
with you, they might even help you get out without charges.[57]

Women often do not report police violence, especially violence
with a sexual component. According to the Lebanese domestic violence NGO Kafa, it
is extremely rare for women to report sexual violence because of the social
stigma associated with being a survivor of sexual assault, fears that they will
be blamed or not taken seriously, and the re-traumatizing process of reporting
such crimes in Lebanon, which usually entails speaking to officials who have no
training in dealing with victims of sexual violence.[58]
When a complaint is filed, the complainant is often taken directly to the place
where the assault took place by male police officers, and many times she is
forced to confront her attacker directly, a process which can be extremely
difficult and which many women prefer to avoid.

In August 2009, Rasha Moumneh, a Human Rights Watch
researcher, was threatened and physically assaulted by a police officer at the
Msaitbeh police station when she went there in her professional capacity to
visit a detainee who had been arrested for homosexuality. This incident,
detailed below, illustrates the extent to which prejudice and discrimination
affect police behavior towards detainees, and the degree to which such behavior
is practiced with impunity.

When Moumneh arrived at the police station seeking to speak
with the detainee, the officer asked Moumneh whether she was “a girl or a
woman,” an obvious attempt to intimidate and harass her by confronting
her with a question about her sexual experience and implying that her sexual
behavior was open to police scrutiny. When she refused to answer, he threatened
to launch an investigation against her and subject her to a forensic exam to
determine whether or not she was a virgin. Moumneh said he had no right to ask
her such a question, and that while he could conduct an investigation if he so
chose, she had the right to know on what basis he was asking her these
questions and whether there was an actual charge against her. Throughout the
exchange, the officer kept yelling at her, telling her to “shut up”
and threatening to kick her out of the station and deny her access to the
detainee the police had called her in to see. When Moumneh asked about the
charge leveled at the detainee, he said that the detainee was “a
faggot.”

When Moumneh asked whether the detainee had been caught
engaging in homosexual sex, the police officer responded that it was not
necessary for him to actually have engaged in any sexual act to charge him with
“homosexuality,” and then stated categorically that “[I] step
on this law with my boot,” and that “I am the law and will
implement it as I see fit.” When Moumneh mentioned that she worked for a
human rights organization, the police officer laughed and made fun of her and
of the very notion of human rights. He then informed her that he was a member
of Hizbullah, and when she asked what relevance that fact had to the situation
at hand, he grabbed her arm, pushed her against the wall, and called an officer
to “remove this garbage from the station.”

Medico-Legal Abuse:
Anal Examinations

Although Article 534 of the penal code criminalizes sexual
acts, police seldom detain people who are actually found having sex. Arrests
for homosexuality are arbitrary on principle, even more so because the law
itself does not explicitly criminalize homosexuality. One method the police use
for determining culpability in these cases is anal examinations conducted by a
forensic doctor on orders from the public prosecutor. On July 28, 2012, the Lebanese
NGO The Legal Agenda launched a successful campaign to end forensic anal
examinations targeting first the Lebanese Doctors’ Syndicate and then the
Ministry of Justice. The campaign followed a raid on a porn cinema in the Burj
Hammoud district of Beirut in August 2012 in which 36 men were arrested and
subjected to the procedure.[59] Three
of the men were charged with homosexuality and public lewdness, while the rest
were released.

Forensic anal examinations are medically and scientifically
unsound and violate international standards against torture and cruel and
degrading treatment, including the Convention against Torture and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Lebanon has
ratified. The U.N. Committee against Torture, in its 2002 review of Egypt,
investigated the issue of forensic anal examinations and called on the
government “to prevent all degrading treatment on the occasion of body
searches.”[60]

The Legal Agenda spearheaded efforts to end these
examinations. In response to these efforts, Dr. Sharaf Abu Sharaf, head of the
Lebanese Doctors’ Syndicate, issued a directive on August 8, 2012. The
directive called for an end to the procedure, stating that forensic anal
examinations are medically and scientifically useless in determining whether
consensual anal sex has taken place and that they constitute a form of torture.
He added that they also violate article 30 of the Lebanese law on medical
ethics, which prohibits doctors from engaging in harmful practices.

In a statement given to the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar on
August 2, Justice Minister Shakib Qortbawi said that he had two months earlier
written to Lawyer General Said Mirza urging him “to halt random rectal
examination procedures, after the issue was raised by human rights
organizations.” However, the lawyer general’s subsequent directive,
the text of which The Legal Agenda published on August 7, contradicts the
spirit of the Minister’s statement to Al-Akhbar.

The Legal Agenda stated that far from ordering an end to the procedures, the
lawyer general’s directive in fact institutionalized them further,
instructing public prosecutors to order the anal examination be carried out
only “with the consent of the accused, according to standard medical
procedures, and in a manner that does not cause significant harm.” The
directive added that if the accused refuses to undergo the examination, he
should be informed that his refusal “constitutes proof of the
crime.”[61]

After much public pressure, Minister Qortbawi released a statement addressed to
the public prosecutor on August 11, 2012, asking him to issue a directive
ending anal examinations completely, although that has yet to happen. [62]

Nevertheless, this statement constitutes a significant step
forward for the rights of LGBT persons in Lebanon, although it remains to be
seen whether the examinations will indeed stop completely. In addition, while
this procedure has been one of the more common ways police “prove”
culpability in homosexuality cases, it is not the only method. As detailed
below, LGBT people, like others in Lebanon, are often coerced into confessing.

Lack of Due Process

The Lebanese Code of Criminal Procedure guarantees detained
suspects due process rights, such as the right to contact a person of their
choosing (a family member, employer, etc.), the right to meet with a lawyer,
the right to an interpreter, the right to be examined by a medical doctor upon
request, and the right to speedy judicial review of their detention.

Article 47 of the Code of Criminal Procedure stipulates that
the police must inform all detained suspects of these rights, although almost
all of the individuals interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported that the
police did not inform them of their rights, particularly the right not to
answer any questions, guaranteed in the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Individuals who had been detained for sex work, drug use,
and homosexuality in Lebanon described to Human Rights Watch being picked up by
police and detained without due process: 19 former detainees told Human Rights
Watch by did not have access to a lawyer; 12 claimed that investigative judges
did not take allegations of torture and forced confessions into consideration;
and 14 were not informed of the charges against them.

Under Lebanese law, police are allowed to detain suspects
for a maximum of 48 hours for preliminary investigation before sending them to
appear before an investigative judge, the 48-hour period renewable once with
permission from the public prosecutor. According to a report by the American
Bar Association, suspects are routinely held in police stations or courthouse
holding cells in excess of that legal time limit. Additionally, Lebanese law
provides that the period of custody should be calculated from the moment of
arrest,[63] but if
the arrest happens at the beginning of a weekend it is common for police to
begin the calculation the following week.[64] Human
Rights Watch documented 15 cases in which suspects had been detained for over
96 hours in either the police station or in a courthouse holding cell before
appearing in front of a judge.

Among the reasons for these violations are lack of funding
and the limited resources available to the judicial system, which suffers from
a lack of staffing and extremely high caseloads.

Eleven interviewees who were arrested for drug use told
Human Rights Watch that police denied them access to medical treatment when
they requested it. In only four cases were doctors able to visit individuals
while in detention. As noted below, denial of medical treatment to induce
withdrawal symptoms may constitute torture or ill-treatment.

In some cases, police have even used a suspect’s
medical condition to extract information from them—an act that the special
rapporteur on torture has made clear can amount to torture.[65]
The case of Saeed, 24, illustrates the problem. Police arrested Saeed in 2010
for using heroin. He told Human Rights Watch that he started to go into
withdrawal on his second day in Hobeish police station. He said,

I was in so much pain, I was screaming
and crying. I begged them to let me see a doctor, but they just laughed at me.
They used the fact that I was withdrawing to get me to confess and to implicate
other people. They knew I was in too much pain to resist, and they promised me
that they would let me see a doctor if I told them what they wanted to know. I
never did see a doctor though. Leaving me like that was their way of punishing
me.[66]

Nabil was arrested in 2008 for using drugs. He told Human
Rights Watch that he was severely beaten in Zahleh police station, where he
says that police detained him for eight days so that his bruises would
disappear before he was let out. He said that throughout the eight-day period
he experienced extremely painful withdrawal symptoms and kept asking for his
medication but that the police ignored him.[67]

Although Lebanese law guarantees the right to a lawyer, the
wording and implementation of the relevant provision, article 49 of the Code of
Criminal Procedure, raises serious concerns about whether adequate checks and
balances are in place to prevent torture and mistreatment by the police.
Article 49 states that “the public prosecutor should conduct the initial
interrogation. If he does, the suspect’s lawyer may be present during
interrogation.” While the law does not expressly prohibit the presence of
a lawyer during police interrogation, police interpret it as guaranteeing the
presence of a lawyer only if the public prosecutor carries out the
questioning, and as not applicable to police interrogations. Police are very
strict about denying suspects access to lawyers during this phase. This is
particularly a concern since most questioning of suspects is conducted by the
police rather than the public prosecutor, although such interrogation is
primarily the latter’s job. Torture and mistreatment most often take
place during police interrogation as police seek confessions. Allowing a lawyer
to be present during this crucial phase would almost certainly help prevent
police abuse.

Ala’a, a non-Lebanese Arab national, was arrested in
April 2012 while he was playing cards with two friends in a parked car next to
the house of a prominent Lebanese politician. Police accused them of
homosexuality, and kept Ala’a in detention for two weeks, moving him from
station to station. Ala’a was not allowed to inform his family, who were
abroad at the time, and his lawyer was denied access to him twice. After not
hearing from him, his parents became worried and traveled to Lebanon, looking
for him in hospitals and jails until they found him in General Security.[68]

Mounira, arrested for drug use in 2011, told Human Rights
Watch that the police actually forced her to call her father and lie to him,
telling him that she was sleeping at a friend’s house rather than
detained at the police station so he would not come looking for her.[69]

According to human rights lawyer Nizar Saghieh, judges often
impose sentences that equal the time detainees have already spent in detention
in police stations, effectively giving police the power to determine the
sentence. As a result, the sentences for the same offense can arbitrarily range
between a few days and several months.[70] Saghieh
added that the police often do not abide by laws regulating how long detainees
can be held before being sent to investigative judges and as a result the
police themselves effectively determining the timing of trials. According to
Saghieh, the police justify this by saying that they do not have enough cars or
personnel.

Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR) states that anyone who is arrested shall be informed,
at the time of arrest, of the reasons for his arrest and shall be promptly
informed of any charges against him. This does not always happen in Lebanon. For
example, when Othman was arrested in 2010 after being entrapped by a police
officer posing as a gay man and asking him for sex, he was beaten, bloodied,
and forced to spend a night in Hobeish police station before he was informed
that he had been arrested for homosexuality.[71]

Police arrested Samira in 2009 on suspicion of sex work as
she was on her way home from a grocery store, telling her it was because of the
way she looked. She told Human Rights Watch that the police had no evidence
against her and no reason to arrest her. After six days of humiliation,
beatings, abuse, and a forced confession, she was transferred to Baabda prison
for two months of pre-trial detention. During the six days she was held in a police
station before her transfer she was not permitted to call her family. A court
later found her innocent of all charges.[72]

Michel was arrested and detained for four days in Hobeish
police station in June 2012 for carrying medication prescribed to him by a
psychiatrist at Skoun where he was being treated for substance dependence.[73]
He said,

I was at a mall in Ashrafieh having a drink with my friend.
When I went out to get cigarettes, three men approached me. One of them stuck
his hand in my pocket and told me he was looking for drugs, so I told him that
I didn't have any and asked him who he was and told him that he didn't have the
right to put his hand in my pocket and search me out of the blue. So he told me
that he and the other two men were from the ISF and that they knew that one of
the people I was with had drugs on him. They told me they would let me go if I
called my friend over. I did, but they didn’t find anything on him. They searched
me once again and that’s when they found the medication that I carry.
They asked me what the medications were for, and I told them very clearly that
I go to Skoun for treatment and these meds were prescribed, but they insisted
that I was a drug user. I kept telling them that I was clean and that I had a
urine test yesterday but they didn’t care.[74]

Michel says that the police then handcuffed him and dragged
him into their jeep and took him to Baydoun police station in the Ashrafieh
district of Beirut. Even after Michel contacted his psychiatrist who confirmed
to the police that he is a patient and that the pills he was carrying are
prescribed, the police did not release him. Police only freed him after four
days in detention.[75]

Carla, whose story appeared earlier in this report, was badly
beaten and detained for 21 days in the Baabda police station. She was not
allowed to see or call her mother despite repeated requests. Police then took
her to Hobeish police station, where she was detained for another four days while
police forced her to help them entrap a drug dealer. She says she was then
moved to the Ouzai police station where she was held for one week of continuous
interrogation. While there, she says a police officer suggested he could get her
released if she slept with him, but she declined. After that she was taken to
Baabda prison, where she was still being held when she spoke to Human Rights
Watch more than a year later, without ever having seen an investigating judge.[76]

Role of Defense Lawyers

Defense lawyers sometimes contribute to ISF impunity. Seven
former detainees told Human Rights Watch that their lawyers had advised them
against complaining to the judge about abuse on the grounds that it would
either take too long or be difficult to prove, especially in cases where there
were no physical signs of abuse.

According to research conducted by the American Bar
Association, Lebanese defense lawyers sometimes fail to appear at court
hearings, often without consequence. The ABA report also documented instances
where lawyers did not adequately represent their clients, charging them extra
fees, for example, or not pursuing correct legal procedures.[77]

Human Rights Watch also heard of cases in which defense
lawyers did not properly follow up on their clients’ cases. Joseph,
arrested in 2007 for drug use, said that he asked the police to send a forensic
doctor to visit him in detention. A doctor came and took pictures of bruises
inflicted by police, but Joseph does not know what happened to the doctor’s
report and says it was not included in his file.[78]
He told Human Rights Watch that he repeatedly asked his lawyer to follow up on
the doctor’s report, but the lawyer did nothing. The end result was a
conviction and no proof that he had been beaten by the police.

Police Corruption

Corruption is pervasive in Lebanon. Transparency
International’s corruption perception index ranked Lebanon 134 out of 183
countries in 2011.[79]
According to a defense lawyer interviewed by Human Rights Watch who preferred to
remain anonymous, lawyers and defendants regularly pay bribes to police for
either favorable treatment or simply to complete procedures in a timely manner.
The pervasive system of personal and familial connections (wasta) allows
well-connected people to exert influence for preferential treatment. Such preferential
treatment can be as small as getting good food in detention, to avoiding a
beating, to having the case dropped entirely.

Nabil was arrested in 2011 for using drugs and taken to
Hobeish police station, where he says he has strong family connections.
“I was treated fine,” he says. “There were many people there
getting beaten up; I could hear their screams, but I wasn’t one of them.
You just need to make sure they get a call from the right person, and
you’ll be fine.”[80]

Nine other individuals interviewed by Human Rights Watch who
were arrested for drug use or homosexuality reported that their socio-economic
status played a large part in determining how police treated them in custody.
Ali’s case is one illustration of this. In 2007, police arrested Ali and
his boyfriend in Ashrafieh for engaging in sexual acts in a parked car. Ali
said that when they found out that he was a university professor, their tone
changed completely from one of insults and verbal abuse to respect. Ali
recounted that the investigating officer even went so far as to completely make
up a bizarre story about how he and his friend were found in that situation and
how it was misinterpreted by the police as being a homosexual encounter.
“Other people in the cell with me who were poor and destitute were
treated like garbage,” he said. Ali and his boyfriend were released two
days later without charge.[81]

Marwan comes from a prominent, well-off family. He was
arrested four times over the course of three years, the last time in 2010. In
each instance, Marwan says that he was treated well by the police, while the
people he was with, who did not enjoy the same social standing or affluence,
were beaten and forced to sign false confessions. This was vividly demonstrated
when police arrested Marwan and a friend of his in April 2010. Both were
carrying small amounts of cocaine. Marwan told Human Rights Watch,

I was immediately able to pull strings to avoid getting
charged. My friend didn’t have the same connections though, and the
police insisted that they had to have something to show for the arrest. They
took me aside and tried to convince me to sign a statement saying that my
friend was attempting to get me into cocaine and that he’s a dealer,
making me out to be innocent. First, that’s untrue: we’re both just
cocaine users. Second, I wasn’t about to send my friend to jail for five
years while I got off scot-free. We argued back and forth, and finally they
figured out a way to get us both released without charge.[82]

Farah suffered from police mistreatment after being arrested
for drug use, but her boyfriend’s family’s personal connections
were strong enough that she was released from custody without charge. In the
summer of 2007, a police officer caught her taking drugs at a beach in the
south of Lebanon. She says that when the police officer saw her, he grabbed her
by the hair and dragged her along the stairs as she screamed. Her boyfriend at
the time saw what was happening and called for her but did not follow them
because he was also on drugs and was scared he would get caught as well.[83]
She said,

They took away my phone and threw me in the police jeep.
There were two other men with me in the car who looked like they were on drugs.
I started yelling from the car that I had the right to call my parents, and
that’s when the officer who was standing next to me came in and slapped
me repeatedly. He was wearing a ring on one of his fingers, so my cheek turned
blue. When he left, I started yelling again asking for my phone; that’s
when he came into the jeep and kicked me in the stomach, saying, “Can you
imagine what my boot would feel like on a girl’s stomach?”

A while later, I started yelling again because one of the
men in the jeep was overdosing, and I begged the police to take him to the Red
Cross ambulance parked nearby. He didn’t care and hit my leg with his
rifle. I started crying from pain, and he started yelling at me to stop crying
and telling me that it was none of my business. We stayed in the car for an
hour and half until my boyfriend came back with his father who has personal
connections with the police and was able to get me out. When my
boyfriend’s dad saw the bruises on my face, he yelled at the officers,
but they just told him that I deserved it because I was driving them crazy.[84]

Wissam was arrested three times, once in 2007 and twice in
2008, and told Human Rights Watch he experienced both police violence and
police corruption. The first time Wissam was arrested, he was returning home
after having bought drugs in the Bekaa region. When he was caught, he quickly
swallowed the bag of drugs before the police could find anything. Wissam says
he was beaten at the Zahleh police station for 24 hours.[85]
He said,

They wanted to know where I hid the drugs, I kept telling
them that I had swallowed it all and that I was in pain but they kept beating
me. It wasn't until I started overdosing because one of the bags burst in my
stomach that they took me to Khoury Hospital. When I went to court and reported
this to the judge, the officers denied it, and the judge quickly closed the
case and dismissed the charges without investigating anything. I don't know what
happened to my file. It doesn’t even exist.[86]

In
2008, Wissam was arrested in Beirut and brought to Hobeish police station. He
told Human Rights Watch that the police extorted him for money because he came
from a well-known and rich family: “When they found out who I was,
they beat me up for two days until the money came. When they got the cash they
wanted, they released me without charge.”

Twenty days later Wissam was
arrested again for drug possession and was tortured by the police, who this
time were seeking the names of drug dealers. He told Human Rights Watch,

First Lieutenant … told me that no matter what
strings I pulled this time, I wouldn’t be released and that he would
teach me a lesson. After a really bad beating, punches, kicks, and more
beatings with sticks, he ordered the officers to take me to a cell that they
had filled with water around 10 cm deep, so that I’d be forced to stand
up and wouldn’t be able to sleep. I stood there like that for four days,
all because they wanted me to give them names of dealers.[87]

Mounira was arrested in 2011 for drug use in the Mar Mkhayel
district of Beirut. She knew the name of the arresting officer, who was also
the one who beat her, but she refused to give it to Human Rights Watch out of
fear of retaliation. The police transferred her to Hobeish police station where
she says they forced her to assist them in entrapping drug dealers.[88]
She said,

They forced me to call the person who gave me the drugs to
set up an appointment with him, promising me that if I did so they would let me
go. We agreed to meet that day, but [the dealer] never showed up. They took me
back to Hobeish but wouldn’t let me call my family. My mom has cancer and
my dad has heart problems, but they still wouldn’t let me call. At around
midnight, they told me to call my dad and tell him that I was sleeping at a
friend’s house.

At 7 a.m. the next day, I went into interrogation in the
morning. The investigating officer kept trying to get other names out of me. He
started hitting me and pulling me by the hair and forcing me to admit to things
that simply were not true. I said yes to everything after that because I wanted
the beating to stop, and I was really scared. The next day they even tried to
stick me with an accusation of drug dealing—just like that. Every time my
phone rang they would try to force me to ask the person on the line how many
grams they want, but I refused, because I just don’t deal.

On the fourth day, they brought me in front of a man they
had arrested, a dealer, and asked me if I knew him. We both said no. The
officer grabbed me and turned me to face him and asked me again menacingly if I
was absolutely sure I didn’t know him. When I said no again, he hit my
face and punched me so hard in the stomach I couldn’t stand up straight
for hours. He said that I had previously confessed to knowing him. It
wasn’t true. I had no idea what they had written down. They just forced
me to sign, and during the beatings I was just delirious from fear, so I just
agreed to everything. I spent eight days in Hobeish and five days in Baabda police
station, and I’ve been in Baabda prison since then awaiting my trial.
When I was taken to the investigative judge on the ninth day, I told him that I
had only signed because I was forced to. He didn’t say a thing.[89]

Judges’ Reliance
on Forced Confessions

Forcing someone to confess violates not only international
law but also article 47 of the Lebanese Code of Criminal Procedure, which
states that “if [suspects] refuse to speak and remain silent, this must
be mentioned in the official report. They must not be forced to speak or to be
interrogated, under penalty of invalidity of their statements.” Our
interviews suggest that, despite this provision, police continue to use
physical force and threats to obtain confessions, and judges continue to accept
such confessions as evidence, particularly in cases involving drugs.

As noted above, confession remains a key element of many investigations
in Lebanon. Judges and policemen often repeat the popular saying
“confession is the king of evidence,” reflecting a combination of bad
habit and inadequate training, despite efforts by donor agencies to equip the
ISF with the tools and the training necessary to conduct scientific
investigations without having to rely on confessions.[90]

When detainees are brought before an investigative judge,
they have an opportunity to confirm or deny the confession and state whether
duress was used. However, most individuals interviewed by Human Rights Watch
whose confessions were coerced did not report the duress, whether because of
threats by the police, because the judge did not ask them, or because of fear
of retaliation. Even when they did report that their confessions had been
extracted under duress, judges tended to ignore the allegations. Speaking about
arrests for homosexuality, human rights lawyer Nizar Saghieh says that in many
cases a confession, even one extracted under duress, is the sole piece of
evidence used to convict a suspect.[91]

Thirty-nine individuals told Human Rights Watch that police
coerced them to sign statements that they had not read or did not agree with, in
part or in their entirety. Courts’ heavy reliance on these statements
constitutes a serious violation of a suspect’s right to due process and a
fair trial.

Even though Lebanese law prohibits the use of forced
confessions to convict people of crimes, 30 former detainees told Human Rights
Watch that courts used such confessions to convict them despite their having
informed the court that the confessions were obtained by force, allegations the
courts ignored.

IV. Impunity

Lebanon’s record in investigating and prosecuting
those responsible for torture is abysmal. Despite the formal criminalization of
the use of violence to extract confessions, the Lebanese judiciary rarely, if
ever, investigates or prosecutes allegations of torture.[92]

Hopes were raised on August 6, 2008, when the Minister of
Interior asked the General Inspectorate to investigate allegations of abuse
occurring inside Lebanese prisons. This followed serious allegations of
corruption and of ill-treatment of prisoners in Roumieh prison. However, the
ministry never made public the results of the investigation and it is unclear
whether anyone was charged.[93]
According to Lt-Colonel Kaed Bey, the head of the ISF’s Human Rights
Unit, there are no official statistics on the number of complaints filed
against members of the ISF or the number of investigations and prosecutions
that resulted.[94]

The apathy of investigative judges is partly to blame. In
only two of six cases we examined in which detainees filed complaints alleging
abuse did the investigative judge order inquiries into the allegations.[95]
Several NGOs have reported that, in most cases, investigative judges ignore
allegations of torture and admit confessions obtained through coercion or
torture, even when it is the only evidence presented at trial.

Inadequate Complaint
Mechanisms

Technically, it is fairly easy to file a complaint against
an ISF officer. A complaint may be made in person, by phone, through the public
prosecutor’s office, or through an intermediary (anonymous complaints are
not accepted).[96] In
practice, however, the complaints mechanism is ineffective and haphazard, and
it is hard for individuals to follow up on their cases. There is no central
office where complaints are processed and no system by which the complainant can
keep track of the complaint. The lack of a centralized system also makes it
difficult to document the number of complaints filed and their outcomes.
Because of the lack of name tags on officers’ uniforms, it is often
difficult for people to correctly identify their abusers.

Only six people that Human Rights Watch spoke to actually
filed a complaint. When we asked the others why they did not file complaints,
they responded that they were directly threatened by the police, had no faith
in the system, did not know how to go about it, did not want to risk exposure
or retaliation, or were simply too scared.

Only two of the six complainants we spoke with said that
measures had been taken against the offending police officers, although in one
of those cases the officer was demoted (the case, detailed above, involved a
police beating that resulted in permanent injuries to the detainee and a $5,000
medical bill that the detainee said he had to pay himself).[97]

In two of the other four cases where complaints were filed, interviewees
told Human Rights Watch that their lawyer did not follow up with the case and
no decision was reached. In the remaining two cases, interviewees said that
police told them that there was not enough evidence to determine that abuse had
taken place.

Moumneh, the Human Rights Watch researcher whom police
threatened with a forced virginity test, promptly filed a complaint against the
officer with both the Minister of Interior and the General Director of the ISF,
and was asked to give her testimony twice. The process at the Ministry of
Interior was respectful and attentive, while the process in the Msaitbeh police
station left much to be desired. Rather than objectively assess the situation
and take her testimony, the investigating officer attempted to make excuses for
the assaulting officer’s behavior, suggesting overtly that it was normal
that he thought that Moumneh might be a sex worker because she was visiting a
person charged with homosexuality and because she had a visible tattoo. And
having assumed she was a sex worker, the investigating officer said, it was
also normal that the offending officer would have treated her in such a manner.
The officer writing down the testimony went so far as to say that he would have
done the same thing, and constantly referred to Moumneh’s personal life
in a derogatory and humiliating manner.

Such treatment indicates an extreme lack of professionalism
in the ISF and a lack of proper training about how to handle complaints and
investigations. Human Rights Watch was later informed that the officer responsible
for the assault was given a four-day jail sentence.

Nawal, the woman that was sexually assaulted in Baabda police
station, told police officers in Hobeish police station about the assault the next
day. Still traumatized by the incident, she was taken back to the exact place
where the assault happened and six male police officers asked her to walk them
through the incident and identify the men. Nawal trembled and cried as she
recounted the story to Human Rights Watch:

It was humiliating. They were all men, I was still
completely shaken and scared by what had happened and they immediately put me
in front of the police officers who attacked me. They denied it and gave me the
dirtiest looks. The officers in Hobeish told me they would take care of the
situation, but I still don’t know if anything happened. I didn’t
tell the investigative judge—I assumed that telling police officers in
Hobeish was enough. They didn’t explain to me what the procedure to
complain was or how to do it. I just wanted to get it over with.[98]

Lack of Proper
Oversight Mechanisms

One of the most important provisions in the Optional
Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) is that Lebanon is required
to set up a “national preventive mechanism” (NPM) to help prevent
torture through a monitoring system that includes periodic visits to detention
facilities by independent monitors. However, Lebanon’s record to date
raises serious concerns that the fate of OPCAT implementation will be similar
to that of Lebanon’s implementation of the UN Convention against Torture
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). Lebanon
has yet to comply with provisions of the latter treaty, including the
requirement that it submit a report detailing steps it has taken to implement
the treaty to the CAT Committee, the international body responsible for
overseeing implementation of the treaty. That report is now 11 years overdue. An
additional reason for concern is that Lebanon ratified CAT with reservations to
article 22, which allows for individual complaints to the CAT Committee when
internal mechanisms of redress prove ineffective.

Under the OPCAT, states parties are required to create NPMs
to monitor and conduct regular visits to places of detention and make
recommendations to the authorities for improvements in the treatment of
detainees and their conditions of detention. In November 2011, two members of
parliament (MPs) introduced a draft bill to establish an NPM, the result of two
years of consultations among MPs, national and international NGOs, and the
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The draft bill mandates the
establishment of a National Human Rights Institution, which includes a
permanent Committee for the Prevention of Torture, a body tasked with carrying
out the duties of the NPM. The Human Rights Committee of the Lebanon’s parliament
began examining the draft legislation in January 2012, two years after the
deadline for the establishment of the NPM had passed, and at this writing parliament
had still not passed it.

Since 2007 Lebanon has taken some steps to counter torture.
In February 2007, it granted the International Committee of the Red Cross
access to all Lebanese detention facilities, including those run by the
Ministry of Defense. In accordance with OPCAT, the Subcommittee on Prevention
of Torture (SPT) visited Lebanon from May 24 to June 2, 2010, and presented its
confidential preliminary observations to Lebanese authorities. The Internal
Security Forces Inspectorate General then created a Human Rights Department by
decree no. 755 of January 3, 2008, tasking it with disseminating knowledge of
human rights and enhancing human rights awareness amongst ISF officers.[99]
In February 2011, the ISF created its Committee for Monitoring against the Use of Torture and Other
Inhuman Practices in Prisons and Detention Centers, jointly administered by the
ISF and Lebanese prisoner rights organization Association Justice and Mercy (AJEM).
In January 2012 the ISF also launched an official Code of Conduct which sets
out professional and ethical standards of behavior to guarantee respect for
human rights and protection of public freedoms in accordance with
Lebanon’s Constitution and its human rights obligations.

However, the Human Rights Department remains severely
understaffed and effectively exercises no real power. It cannot, for example,
order or carry out investigations into allegations of torture or mistreatment.
Thus far it has also not reported any of its findings to the public. The
Committee for Monitoring against the Use of Torture is toothless and so far has
not operated as an effective body for prevention or accountability.

V. Role of International Community

The US, EU, UK, and France, among others, have contributed
significant amounts of aid and technical assistance to the ISF over the past
few years. The assistance has mainly been in the form of trainings, various
internal reform projects, and updated equipment.

The US is the ISF’s biggest donor, having contributed
around $125 million since 2008 in contributions to various reform projects,
trainings, and equipment. The EU has spent around 16.5 million euro on various
ISF reform projects since 2007. According to US and EU representatives familiar
with ISF assistance programs, police abuse of suspects stems in part from lack
of skills in investigative techniques (other than extracting confessions) and
from lack of police training (much of the training they receive is military
training, inappropriate to most policing situations).

Donor countries are thus heavily invested in training ISF
officers in basic interrogation and investigation techniques. The US has thus
far trained 9,000 officers in these methods and has built an updated training
facility for this purpose, while the EU has trained 55 officers to be trainers
themselves, and they in turn have trained around 5,000 officers. According to
the US embassy in Lebanon, the US-funded training incorporates a human rights
module.[100]

However, Human Rights Watch research, as well as research by
other local and international organizations, has found that police abuse of
suspects in stations remains a problem, and reliance on confessions, often extracted
through coercion, remains common. This is particularly
a problem with the Drug Repression Bureau and police units concerned with
preserving morality. Section
620M of the Foreign Assistance Act (the “Leahy Law”) prohibits the US government from providing any
assistance to a security unit if there is credible information that the
unit has committed gross violations of human rights. According to the US
embassy in Lebanon, all ISF members trained using US funding are subject to
vetting under the Leahy Law and the US government does not train units for whom
there is credible information about human rights abuses brought to the
embassy’s attention through third parties or the embassy’s own
investigations.[101] To our
knowledge, the Leahy Law has not yet been applied to deny aid to any ISF units.

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) began working
with the ISF in 2008 and has focused its efforts on helping the ISF develop a
strategic plan for the organization, fostering a culture of human rights, and
strengthening ties between the public and the police force. Additionally, the FCO
has supported the ISF to develop a Code of Conduct that includes basic human
rights standards often neglected by police officers, and has assisted the ISF
to develop a broad implementation program for it, which has yet to be
rolled-out.

While considerable time, money, and energy has gone into
training the ISF, the impact is still minimal compared to the needs identified
and its impact has been unevenly spread across the ISF. The Information Branch
and Crime Scene Investigation Units are now the most technically advanced units
in the ISF.[102] By
contrast, the judicial police, particularly those units discussed in this
report, do not appear to have benefitted from trainings in the same way, and
older methods, such as extraction of confessions by force, are still a mainstay
of their investigation techniques.[103]

So far, to our knowledge, no donor country has funded implementation
of ISF oversight mechanisms, and the absence of statistics on police abuse or
other documentation of ISF response to complaints makes it impossible to track
progress on this front.

Annex 1: Letter to the Minister of Justice

Human
Rights Watch is preparing a report on police abuse and mistreatment of
vulnerable communities in Lebanon – namely drug users, sex workers, and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons. While the report mostly
focuses on police treatment of detainees, it also examined the role of
investigative judges. Our established practice is to submit our findings to the
authorities whose record is the subject of the report, in order for their
information and point of view to be reflected in the reports that we publish.

We
submit the questions below, as well as a summary of our principal findings, in
the hope that you will respond. We will endeavor to reflect any relevant
information you send to us into our report, provided we receive it by February 25,
2013.

1. Lack of
Judicial Investigation of Allegations of Torture

Between
February and August 2012, Human Rights Watch spoke to 52 individuals that the
Internal Security Forces (ISF) had arrested
for suspected drug use, sex work, or homosexuality over the past five years.
Forty-nine of those interviewed reported that ISF members threatened,
humiliated, or tortured them. According to the witnesses, physical violence was
not just used to extract confessions but also as a form of punishment,
discipline, and behavioral correction.

The most
common forms of torture reported to Human Rights Watch included beatings on
different parts of the body, with fists, boots, or implements such as sticks,
canes, or rulers. Eleven former detainees said that
police forced them to listen to the screams of other detainees being
beaten in order to scare them into cooperating or confessing. Seventeen
reported being denied food, water, and medication when they needed it, or of
having their medication confiscated. Nine individuals reported being handcuffed
in bathrooms or in extremely uncomfortable positions for hours at a time.

Fifteen women
out of 19 detained for sex work or drug use told Human Rights Watch that police
had subjected them to some form of sexual violence, ranging from sexual assault
to giving prisoners “favors” (such as cigarettes, food, more
comfortable conditions in their cells, or even a more lenient police report) in
exchange for sex.

Twenty-three
individuals told Human Rights Watch that police extracted confessions from them
through mental and physical coercion. In some cases the confessions were false,
and in others they amounted to the only piece of evidence presented to support
charges against them.

Additionally,
Human Rights Watch has found that the current complaints mechanism is
ineffective, haphazard, and it is very hard for individuals to follow up on
their cases. Only six people with whom Human Rights Watch spoke actually took
the steps to file any complaints. When asked why they did not file complaints,
they responded that they either were directly threatened by the police, had no
faith in the system, did not know how to go about it, did not want to risk
exposure or retaliation, or were simply too scared. It is especially difficult
for communities who are already socially marginalized to file complaints. Out
of 49 interviewed who alleged ill-treatment, only 6 filed a complaint. Only two
of those interviewed reported that a police officer was disciplined for torture
and mistreatment.

Allegations
made by former detainees about investigative judges were telling. Twenty-two
former detainees told Human Rights Watch that they were brought before
investigative judges without the presence of a lawyer guaranteed to them by
law. In only three cases reviewed in this report did the investigative judge
order an investigation into allegations of duress in the obtaining of
confessions. Five former detainees told Human Rights Watch that investigative
judges dismissed outright their allegations of mistreatment, intimidation and
abuse, while twelve claimed that investigative judges did not take allegations
of torture and forced confessions into consideration.

In 2012,
how many ISF officers were investigated in connected to abuse of detainees? How
many were indicted?

2.Lack
of Due Process

Individuals
who had been detained for sex work, drug use, and homosexuality in Lebanon
described to Human Rights Watch being picked up by police and detained without
due process: For example, 19 former detainees told Human Rights Watch they did
not have access to a lawyer; 12 claimed that investigative judges did not take
allegations of torture and forced confessions into consideration; and 14 were
not informed of the charges against them. Additionally, Human Rights Watch
documented 15 cases in which suspects had been detained for over the 96 hours
allowed by law in either the police station or in a courthouse holding cell
before appearing in front of a judge.

How is the
judiciary overseeing such violations and what measures is it taking to ensure
that they do not occur?

Human Rights
Watch urges the judiciary to supervise investigations more closely as per its
mandate in order to prevent police abuse and mistreatment. It should also take
allegations of abuse and torture very seriously and investigate any and all
allegations promptly.

Annex 2: Letter to the Minister of Interior

February
4, 2012

Mr.
Marwan Charbel
Minister of Interior

Ministry
of the Interior

Al
Hamra, Sinai

Beirut,
Lebanon

Dear
Minister Charbel,

Human
Rights Watch is preparing a report on police abuse and mistreatment of
vulnerable communities in Lebanon, namely drug users, sex workers, and lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender persons. Our established practice is to submit
our findings to the authorities whose record is the subject of the report, in
order for their information and point of view to be reflected in the reports
that we publish.

We
submit the questions below, as well as a summary of our principal findings, in
the hope that you will respond. We will endeavor to reflect any relevant
information you send us into our report, provided we receive it by February 25,
2013.

1. Ill-treatment
and Torture in Police Stations

Between
February and August 2012, Human Rights Watch spoke to 52 individuals that the
Internal Security Forces (ISF) had arrested
for suspected drug use, sex work, or homosexuality over the past five years.
Forty-nine of those interviewed reported that ISF members threatened,
humiliated, or tortured them. According to the witnesses, physical violence was
not just used to extract confessions but also as a form of punishment,
discipline, and behavioral correction.

The most
common forms of torture reported to Human Rights Watch included beatings on
different parts of the body, with fists, boots, or implements such as sticks,
canes, or rulers. Eleven former detainees said that police forced them to
listen to the screams of other detainees being beaten in order to scare them
into cooperating or confessing. Seventeen reported being denied food, water,
and medication when they needed it, or of having their medication confiscated.
Nine individuals reported being handcuffed in bathrooms or in extremely
uncomfortable positions for hours at a time.

Fifteen women
out of 19 detained for sex work or drug use told Human Rights Watch that police
had subjected them to some form of sexual violence, ranging from sexual assault
to giving prisoners “favors” (such as cigarettes, food, more
comfortable conditions in their cells, or even a more lenient police report) in
exchange for sex.

Twenty-three
individuals told Human Rights Watch that police extracted confessions from them
through mental and physical coercion. In some cases, the suspects told us that
the confessions were false, and in others they amounted to the only piece of
evidence presented to support charges against them.

We know that
the Ministry of Interior and the ISF have taken some steps to reduce torture
and abuse in detention by setting up a Human Rights Unit, a torture monitoring
body, as well as adopting a Code of Conduct for ISF officers.

We would like
to ask you to respond to the following questions so that we can accurately
represent the government’s efforts:

What
concrete steps are being taken to implement the code of conduct,
particularly the prohibition on use of force?

What
training is provided to security forces and interrogators with respect to
interrogation methods and the use of coercion and torture?

How many
visits did the Human Rights Unit conduct in 2012, and to which police
stations?
What was the outcome of the visits?

2. Lack of
Due process

Individuals
who had been detained for sex work, drug use, and homosexuality in Lebanon
described to Human Rights Watch being picked up by police and detained without
due process: For example, 19 former detainees told Human Rights Watch by did
not have access to a lawyer; 12 claimed that investigative judges did not take
allegations of torture and forced confessions into consideration; and 14 were
not informed of the charges against them. Additionally, Human Rights Watch
documented 15 cases in which suspects had been detained for over the 96 hours
allowed by law in either the police station or in a courthouse holding cell
before appearing in front of a judge.

What
measures are in place to prevent police detaining people longer than the
time permitted under the Code of Criminal Procedure?

Are
statistics available on how long people remain in detention before being
referred to an investigative judge?

What
measures are in place to ensure that people can call a lawyer or receive
medical treatment when requested?

3. Complaints
Mechanisms

According to
our research, the current complaints mechanism within the ISF and the Ministry
of Interior is ineffective, haphazard, and it is very hard for individuals to
follow up on their cases. Only six people with
whom Human
Rights Watch spoke actually took the steps to file any complaints. When asked
why they did not file complaints, they responded that they either were directly
threatened by the police, had no faith in the system, did not know how to go
about it, did not want to risk exposure or retaliation, or were simply too
scared. It is especially difficult for communities who are already socially
marginalized to file complaints.

Given these
findings, we have compiled a list of questions pertaining specifically to the
issue of impunity and complaints of police violence and abuse:

In 2012,
how many complaints of police abuse has the ISF received?

What is
the procedure of following up on submitted complaints?

In 2012,
how many investigations were launched on the basis of submitted
complaints?

In 2012,
what sorts of disciplinary measures were carried out against police
officers found guilty of abuse?

What
concrete steps has the Ministry of Interior taken to ensure that
individuals are able to seek redress for abuse committed by the police?

We
look forward to reading your comments on the above issues, as well as any
additional comments you wish to provide on the issues of police abuse and
redress for violations.
We welcome an opportunity to discuss these questions and our preliminary
findings with you in person. As stated above, we will be able to reflect
any pertinent information you provide to us by February 25, 2013 in our final
report.

Annex 3: Response from the Ministry of Interior
and Municipalities

Having read your letter
in preparation for the publication of your report on police violations, we wish
to clarify several matters:

1. Regarding the lack of
judicial investigations of torture allegations

The status of human
rights within the Internal Security Forces is in a state of ongoing
development. We must note several important matters in this field:

The establishment of
a human rights department in the Office of the General Inspector of the
Internal Security Forces in 2008;

The establishment of
a committee to investigate cases of torture in the Internal Security
Forces;

The issuance of a
code of conduct; and

The issuance and
recent adoption of a strategic plan for the Internal Security Forces. The
plan defines a clear vision, namely “to fulfill the hopes of
citizens and gain their full confidence.” The plan identifies
several priorities, the first being respect for human rights and
liberties.

Regarding tangible
steps taken to implement the code of conduct, the general directorate amended
the internal penal provisions for misconduct to include human rights violations
in the disciplinary code of the Internal Security Forces, a fundamental measure
to implement the code of conduct.

The code of conduct is
also a mandatory part of the curriculum at the Training Academy in Werwar, as
is a human rights component in the curriculum. In this respect, a detailed
learning kit was designed in full compliance with international standards and
with provisions in the constitution and existing laws, as well as with
international conventions to which Lebanon is party in this field.

Several training
programs are carried out in close cooperation with nongovernmental
organizations for officers and personnel in various fields, particularly in the
areas of judicial investigation – focusing on the provisions of the code
of conduct and human rights more generally – and on improving the level
of criminal investigation. Currently the final touches are being put on the
Practical Guide for Criminal Investigation Techniques, prepared by a group of
judges and officers in direct cooperation with the EU.

Regarding visits to
detention facilities, in 2012 the Internal Security Forces’ anti-torture
committee, comprised of seven officers, among them the chair of the human
rights department, visited all prisons, holding cells, and the Palace of Justice,
as well as a number of holding cells in police stations, regional groups,
factions regional branches, administration offices, and judicial offices, to
determine the conditions of detainees, cells, and detention facilities. These
visits had a positive impact on improving light, paint, and other conditions.
At the end of each visit, the committee prepares a report and forwards it to
the general directorate, with clear recommendations for the punishment of any
human rights offenders, and indeed several persons were punished.

2. Regarding the lack of
proper procedures

Article 47 of the Code
of Criminal Procedures clearly defines the duration of detention in judicial
police centers, which, as you noted, may not exceed 96 hours. Article 48 of the
code explicitly states that judicial officers who contravene these detention
rules commit the crime of deprivation of liberty stipulated in Article 367 of
the Penal Code.

Yet, we must note that
the detention order is a judicial order given by the competent public prosecutor.
As such, it is not a prerogative of the judicial police officer—an
extremely significant point. In practice, when any arrested person is held in
judicial police centers for more than this specified period, which happens
occasionally, it is because the Palace of Justice is unable to process all
detainees. They are therefore held in safety at a center for judicial
administration on behalf of the competent Public Prosecution, pursuant to a
clear, explicit judicial order.

As for the ability of
persons to contact attorneys or receive medical treatment when requested, these
rights are explicitly upheld in Article 47 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Given the importance of these rights, they are posted at the main entrances of
most detention cells and detention centers in Arabic, English, and French. They
are also clearly noted on the second page of the interrogation report. The
judicial police officer must read these rights to the arrested person
immediately upon taking him into custody for questioning and obtain his
signature and this under threat of criminal and disciplinary action.

In practice, a doctor
and attorney are usually made available as follows: the judicial police officer
secures a doctor with the Internal Security Forces or another body pursuant to
the Public Prosecution’s order and provides the attorney requested by the
detainee without need for an official power of attorney as dictated by
procedures.

3. Regarding mechanisms for
complaints

You stated in your
letter that the existing complaint mechanisms in the Ministry of Interior and
the Internal Security Forces are ineffective and arbitrary, and it is difficult
for individuals to track the progress of their cases and complaints.

We publicly announce
that it is no secret that we read the above with surprise and dismay. Although
the mechanisms for complaints may not be uniform, they are largely effective.
Citizens can submit complaints to several sources, including but not limited to
the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities, the Office of the General
Inspector, the competent divisions at the General Directorate of the Internal
Security Forces, and the direct superior of the person against whom the
complaint is lodged. This is in addition to complaints filed with the competent
judicial bodies when the actions constitute a criminal offense.

Moreover, complaints
filed with the ministry and the general directorate are pursued with the
necessary diligence, starting when persons are summoned for questioning and
until the complainant is informed of the result of his complaint, and this
happens daily.

It must be noted that
your letter stated that people who did not file complaints were afraid or had
no confidence in the system. In our opinion, this is avoiding the proper course
of action, and the problem is with the person who does not file a complaint,
for by failing to do so, he aids the offender in committing further abuses. As
such, we encourage all persons to file their complaints in accordance with the
rules, so that we may limit violations and punish offenders when
necessary.

It should further be
noted that granting compensation for abuses is not within the purview of the
Ministry of Interior and Municipalities, but is rather up to the courts. The
ministry and all its agencies, particularly law enforcement agencies, are
subject to existing laws and orders of the competent judiciary, first and
foremost the judgments it issues, particularly in connection with human rights
violations. It is worth pointing out that we are witnessing a fundamental
transformation in judicial rulings in this regard, as some courts have begun to
rely on the provisions of international conventions in addition to the
constitution and domestic laws.

Work is underway
to create a scientific database using advanced technology in the human rights
department. The database will include all complaints, actions taken, and the
outcome, and will be available for reference when needed. The human rights
department is also currently documenting all official and unofficial interactions
related to human rights. The logistics for this are currently under
preparation, while the department is acquiring the additional staff necessary
to perform its tasks.

Acknowledgments

This report is based on research conducted by Human Rights
Watch in Lebanon from between February and July 2012. The report was edited by
Nadim Houry, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Division, and
Graeme Reid, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights
Division.

Additional reviews were conducted by Lama Fakih, Syria and
Lebanon researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division, Liesl
Gerntholtz, director of the Women’s Rights Division, and Rebecca
Schleifer, advocacy director for the Health and Human Rights Division. Legal
review was by Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor, program review by Danielle
Haas, and final program review by senior editor Joseph Saunders, deputy program
director.

We are grateful to all the men and women who met with us to
share their experiences at great risk to themselves. We would also like to
thank the organizations who assisted in our research, including The Legal
Agenda, Skoun, AJEM, and Helem.

[1]
A torture technique in which the victim is suspended by the feet with hands
tied together to an iron bar passed under the knees. See Human Rights Watch, Syria:
Documented Torture Methods, presentation, June 28, 2012,
http://www.hrw.org/features/syria-documented-torture-methods

[5]
Helem, “Homosexual Relations in the Penal Codes: General Study Regarding
the Laws in the Arab Countries with a Report on Lebanon and Tunisia”,
2010, http://www.helem.net/node/188 (accessed February 4, 2013).

[9]
UN Commission on Human Rights, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the human
rights aspects of the victims of trafficking in persons, especially women and
children, Sigma Huda, Mission to Lebanon, E/CN.4/2006/62/Add.3, February 20,
2006.

[25]
Specifically, article 47 of Lebanon’s Code of Criminal Procedure states
that “If [suspects] refuse to speak and remain silent, this must be
mentioned in the official report. They must not be forced to speak or to be
interrogated, under penalty of invalidity of their statements,” while
article 77 states that “the Examining Judge must take into consideration
the principle of freedom of will of the defendant during his interrogation. He
must ensure that the defendant gives his statement without any external
influence, be it moral or physical. If the defendant refuses to answer and
remains silent, the Examining Judge does not have the right to force him to
speak.”

[60]
Committee against Torture, “Consideration of Reports Submitted by States
Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of
the Committee against Torture, Egypt,” CAT/C/CR/29/4 December 23, 2002.

[61]
The Legal Agenda, “After the head Beirut’s doctor’s
syndicate’s directive to stop the tests of shame, the Legal Agenda
publishes the public prosecutor’s directive legalizing them”,
August 7, 2012,
http://legal-agenda.com/newsarticle.php?id=136&folder=legalnews&lang=en
(accessed February 4, 2013).

[62] Letter from Shakib Qortbawi to public
prosecutors, August 11, 2012, http://www.legal-agenda.com/images/legalnews/1346419736-كتاب%20وزير%20العدل%20شكيب%20قرطباوي.pdf (accessed February 7,
2013).

[90] One of the most notable of these projects is the
EU-funded “Security and Rule of Law” project, which started in 2009
and is scheduled to run until 2014 and aims to improve the ISF’s criminal
investigation capabilities and internal training structures and resources.

[91]
Helem, “Homosexual Relations in the Penal Codes: General Study Regarding
the Laws in the Arab Countries with a Report on Lebanon and Tunisia”,
2010, http://www.helem.net/node/188 (accessed February 4, 2013).